


Seeds

by Mooniki



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 14:13:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15798186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mooniki/pseuds/Mooniki
Summary: After the war, Emmeline reflects on her schooldays and the concept of allegiance.





	Seeds

The Order of the Phoenix officially disbanded on the first of November, when the snow was fresh and the storm gestating beneath the fireworks. Emmeline had never been one for solemn affairs, a fact which always, to her amusement, surprised even the closest of acquaintances. But then again she did lead – and made very public her desire to lead – a no-fuss life where only those conversant with the duties of the day had a place, so long as they kept their distance. Her former colleagues gawked as she rapped on the counter for Aberforth, a pyramid of empty glasses already set before her and laying her out as clearly. She was certainly burning bridges tonight.

Thanks to an impromptu trumpet parade, she’d arrived after the eulogies, for which the grief-stricken had begged sobriety as a prerequisite for all attendees, and rejoined the happier lot who had moved the after party to the Hog’s Head. Though some of them still fingered their black armbands nervously, she was glad that on the whole this bunch seemed less woebegone. Why, the idiot Diggle was even gasconading a gaggle of Veela by the door.

“One Dragon Fire on the rocks, extra cilantro,” Aberforth grunted, sliding her most recent order down to her.

“How much do I owe you?” She asked, a group of homecoming students thumping over her voice from their side of the bar.

Aberforth waved a dismissive hand and she grinned. They had an understanding, Abe and her: neither ask nor expect too much. Next time she would leave him five galleons under the dishrags.

Hestia Jones proved harder to avoid. “’Lo, Emmy.”

“Jones,” she said curtly, nodding.

The buxom witch propelled herself onto the stool next to her, bracing her feet against the lower rung of the chair and leant in, her rosy cheeks flaming from a fruity drink too many. She could outsit even Emmeline herself when the occasion arose, not because she could hold her liquor but because one glass bottom was enough to knock her into desultory conversation. “I hear Andy might show tonight.”

“Andromeda Black?” Emmeline asked, raising an eyebrow and wondered how Andromeda would react to Hestia’s hypocorism; the Andromeda she knew from school would have hexed her nose freckles purple.

“She’s Tonks now. Been married, what has it been, nine, ten years? Their little Dora is darling, calls everyone ‘Mum,’ bless her.” Hestia shifted her stool closer and Emmeline looked for an exit strategy over her shoulder. “We were in Hufflepuff together, Ted and I, remember that?”

Emmeline shrugged. “Once a Black, always a Black.”

“Ah, I take it you didn’t get along!” Hestia hopped. “She was in Slytherin, wasn’t she? But I never thought there was much of a rivalry with Ravenclaw, though now that I think back to it –”

“The Blacks foster a very distinct bloodline, is all I meant,” Emmeline said. “It’s the eyes,” she added, disgruntled, when Hestia prompted her. “Proud eyes.”

“I never noticed,” Hestia frowned. “Though her cousin – you know, the explosion this morning and Pettigrew dead – I always thought _he_ was an arrogant boy. Never listened to anyone on duty if he could help it! And I guess now we know why!”

Emmeline did not reply – the idea of a party had been attractive precisely because it offered an alternative to the talks of death and betrayal circulating amongst the Order crowd. Hestia faltered at her conversation partner’s lack of enthusiasm. “Well, s’pose none of us know anything in the end,” she conceded, slurring.

\--

“What are you doing?”

Grey eyes, green scarf, Head Girl badge. It was all Emmeline needed to know and she returned to her scratch pad with disinterest. “People-watching. Not going to dock points, are you?”

“I’m meeting someone here.” Emmeline lifted her quill and looked again. The Slytherin was leaning against the masonry with no intention of forfeiting her appointment. “Want me to bugger off?”

“No,” the other said. “You can watch.”

 _A queen, pardoning her trespasser_ , Emmeline wrote.

\--

The first-year had said something about brooms, certainly something illegal about brooms, then the Slytherin had given him a few sickles and told him not to ask his mother for pocket change anymore, and to buy his brother something nice for Christmas.

And maybe some hair potion, Emmeline snickered. The boy had attempted to make his sleek locks stick up at the back and, failing that, was looking more like a wilted hedgehog. The Slytherin seemed to share the same sentiment because she ruffled the child’s hair back to normalcy before sending him on his way.

“A Gryffindor,” Emmeline chortled when he had bounced out of sight.

“My cousin,” the Slytherin said, her voice weighted with affection and envy.

\--

Emmeline caught the last few minutes of the match, standing on the edge of the pitch near the south-end changing rooms and sipping pumpkin juice. As the team came in, they cast her distrustful looks as if she might draw her wand on them and, had they not been so mud-splattered and bruised, they might have acted on their suspicions.

The last scraped elbow filed past, leaving only the keeper to collect the stray balls midfield. “Good game,” Emmeline called, walking up and stuffing the goblet in her bag.

“You lost,” Andromeda landed smoothly with the snitch in her hand, shaking out her sweat-soaked hair. “Four-hundred-and-twenty to thirty.”

“But see,” Emmeline said. “I never cared much about Quidditch.”

Andromeda stared at her, then broke into a laugh which did not subside until she had toppled off her broomstick and was bent over the ball trunk, heaving for breath. Behind her the stands slowly drained of their colours. “Vance,” she wheezed at last, getting to her feet. “It’s not just about Quidditch.”

And still chuckling, she disappeared into the changing rooms where Emmeline could not follow.

\--

Every Tuesday, they met near the flagstones to smoke. The lonely houses, Andromeda had said once when she was too high to make sense. Friendships are hard in a lonely house. But mostly when Andromeda talked, she talked about herself; Emmeline liked that about her.

“Do you remember Ted Tonks?”

“No, was he in Ravenclaw?”

“Hufflepuff. Three years above me, six above you.”

Emmeline shook her head. She rarely knew names, never got close enough to find out, but she might know his face if Andromeda had a picture.

She didn't.

“We’re getting married, when I leave school. My parents have arranged for me to wed Rabastan in July, we can’t wait any longer.”

“Oh,” Emmeline said. Her tongue had gone numb.

“He’s a muggleborn.”

“Quite a risk,” she said unclearly, chewing on the dead muscle and saying none of the things she was thinking.

“Not really,” and Andromeda turned to cup her gaze, her eyes just as grey and arrogant as they were the day they met. “But I can’t afford to fight for more.”

“You’re already fighting,” Emmeline said.

\--

Every other day of the week, the three sisters would take their walk by the lake as Emmeline watched on, led by the same angle of neck and nose. Bellatrix walked with a chaotic stomp, Narcissa with a graceful heel and Andromeda endlessly smiling as they showered each other with freshly mown grass.

\--

“Here,” Emmeline panted, thrusting a newspaper at Andromeda to excuse her tardiness.

“What’s this?”

“The Appleby Arrows – they’re recruiting: their last team got trampled by a herd of mooncalves while on holiday,” Emmeline explained. “I’ve seen you play.”

“Vance –”

“Go with Tonks if you want, just, please,” she insisted. “There’re no houses in the British League.”

“I don’t know,” Andromeda said shortly. “There’s a war.”

Emmeline knew she wasn’t referring to the one outside the castle walls. “Tryouts are next week so I suggest you talk to Slughorn now before it’s too late.” She walked off without waiting to hear the other argue back.

\--

Andromeda was absent from the Great Hall on Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday. Emmeline caught her arm in the hallway on Thursday, just before dinner. “Did you go?”

“I went,” Andromeda said hesitantly, not looking at her.

“And?” Emmeline pressed. People skirted around them, avoiding what appeared to them a typical altercation. Andromeda pulled her hood away from her face. Beneath her fringe, her eyes were tired but she said she was awake. And Emmeline let go, wondering why the keeper had run away.

\--

The Seventh Year convocation was held on the front lawns of the school. The choir was able to get three-quarters of the way through a Movement in A Minor before scattering for a swarm of escaped doxies, the gamekeeper roaring after them and brandishing his pink umbrella. Some of her fellow fourth-years were out here, also, those with family and friends graduating. Emmeline did not know whether she should count Andromeda as either but she was here all the same, staring at the teenager three rows ahead, pressed tight between a primly dressed witch and wizard.

“My parents,” Andromeda introduced, finding her after the ceremony and gesturing to the two people who gave stiff nods of acknowledgement. Perhaps they were too tired for movement, bowed as they were beneath the heaty weight of their puffskein hats and heavy cloaks.

“Your father and I are going into the castle,” the witch said to her daughter, taking out an engraved silver fan and made it flap with a flick of her wand. “Walburga wants to see her son.”

“Here she is,” the wizard rumbled as another woman walked up, dressed in the same funeral attire as her relatives laden with dark furs and ermine trim. She affixed her grey eyes on Emmeline who took a step forward with hand proffered. For a second, neither moved. Then her lips parted in a hissing sneer. “Half-blood.”

Andromeda put a hand on Emmeline’s back as she flinched and the adults walked away, murmuring among themselves. “My aunt,” she said quietly, “is not well.”

Emmeline replaced her shaking hand in her pocket. “Has she always been like that?”

“It’s not her fault. They’ve let it – the family thinks it’s normal.” Andromeda drew her into the shade by the elbow. It was cooler in the darkness cast by the forest foliage, and further from the noise. “She used to play the piano for us sometimes. She liked Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky.”

“Muggles?”

“Yes,” Andromeda said, digging into the bottom of her handbag. “She said all music was magic. But after having her son… Father told us our aunt was having trouble adjusting. Then once, when we were over, the baby wouldn’t stop crying and she picked it up and –” She paused. “Sirius still has the scar, right here,” she pointed to the base of her skull, just behind the ear. “Can’t heal what’s inflicted by blood.”

Emmeline opened her mouth to speak but Andromeda picked up her hand and pressed something cold into it – five silver sickles. “Please, give these to my cousin when I’m gone. He shouldn’t worry for gold.”

“You can owl him yourself,” Emmeline said, trying to return the coins. Andromeda shook her head. “He wouldn’t want to explain to his friends.”

Emmeline nudged her with the money again, insistent. “Why don’t you let him make that decision for himself?”

“Emmeline,” Andromeda said, using her first name for the first time. “They’re not family.”

“Doesn’t mean they won’t understand,” Emmeline said. “And it doesn’t mean they can’t be.”

\--

Her first letter from Andromeda came in September that year, three days after the opening feast. There was no note, just five sickles in a paper envelope. With a jolt, Emmeline remembered that she was married now.

She cornered the young Gryffindor as he was leaving the greenhouses with his friends and he told them to go ahead without him.

“Buy your brother something nice for Christmas,” she said, giving him the money. He stuffed the sickles in his pocket and ran off after the three boys who had stopped to wait by the beech tree despite his instructions. One of them turned to ask him a question and he shook his head. The other boy did not ask again.

There was another envelope in the mail the following month, and the month after. The money often appeared in unlikely places around the school as dungbombs or stink pellets or a new winter scarf, blown away and tangled in the branches of the Whomping Willow.

Emmeline had a thought as she slit open her seventh envelope from Andromeda, not a single ink blot on its surface as always, that these were not coins but seeds.

\--

It was not until many years later that Emmeline reaped Andromeda’s harvest. The autumn bushel came standing on the doorstep of Order headquarters, its hair in a ponytail and reeking of cigarettes. She almost didn’t recognize him but it was the eyes that gave him away. Proud eyes.

“I’m not who you think I am,” he said defensively when she didn’t move aside, lifting his hand to tuck a stray strand of hair behind his ear. “I’m here to fight.”

She looked him in the eye and told him to come inside and to not touch anything, thinking, _once a Black, always a Black_.

\--

She visited Andromeda’s little house in Staffordshire, once, when she was doing a stint as an intern at the Daily Prophet, weeks before Dumbledore approached her with an outrageous proposition. She had traced the address by treating her monthly messenger to generous bribes in the form of Eeylops’ Finest, not that she’d received any more packages from Andromeda since graduation. The address was scrawled in the margin of her History of Magic text, which she rediscovered quite by accident, shoving aside stacks of N.E.W.T revision notes.

The sidewalk was cracked with weeds beneath her feet and it stopped at an intersection across from a house painted slate with a shiplap roof. Just behind the picket fence, a man was pottering around the front yard with a trowel, putting daffodil bulbs six inches under, and her desire to ring the doorbell dissipated.

“Good morning,” he said to her, looking up. “Are you here for Andy?”

Trapped by kindness, Andromeda had said one Tuesday at Hogwarts in a fit of drug-induced madness. They always come disguised in their soft-spoken words, their books, their smiles, the tricks you never learned growing up.

“Just walking,” Emmeline said, and strolled on.

\--

Hestia glanced at the clock above the empty wine board. “It’s almost two, I wonder what’s keeping her.”

Emmeline looked too. It was indeed late, and Andromeda might show at any time. “I’m going home,” she pushed her glasses towards Abe with a grateful smile his way.

“And where are you off to after?” Hestia asked. “Think of the vacation opportunities, now that the blockades have opened up! Won’t it be nice to stretch your legs?”

Emmeline was prepared to tell her that no, she planned to spend the next month sleeping off her battle wounds when Hestia, with a quivering lip, did the one thing Emmeline least expected of her and burst into noisy tears.

Aberforth stumped over, thrusting a dirty rag across the counter. “Blow.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she blustered, patting herself for a handkerchief before picking up the rag gingerly. “I know I should be happy that Y-You-Know-Who is gone but, but,” and Hestia blew her nose.

Looking sated, Aberforth said, “Lost people, did you?”

“We weren’t none of us friends but we fought together. We fought together,” Hestia said miserably. “The Prewetts, the Bones… and James Potter’s friends, weren’t they such lovely boys? Li-Lily told me she wanted to go to Brighton in the spring if the fighting stopped –”

“It was Black,” Emmeline interrupted, standing and wiping her mouth with a napkin. People had convenient memories, but her observation logs were not threatened by the news of the day. “Sirius Black was the one who said he wanted to take Harry south when the war was over.”

Hestia and Aberforth both looked at her. Emmeline shrugged on her autumn cloak though the wind had already climbed into a howl and there would be a ways to walk yet before she could apparate.

“We all fought our hardest, and that’s what counts,” Hestia said at last, hiccoughing. “And… it was a hard war,” she finished, her chin drooping onto her chest.

Aberforth levitated over Hestia a baggy peacoat that one of the students had abandoned and Emmeline thought of the woman sitting at her kitchen table while her parents slept on upstairs: the wrinkle of her bodice, the scorched hems, her bare feet wrapped in a layer of red boils while she dripped rice from her hair, asking for something strong. Emmeline had taken out two glasses before she understood the question and she returned to the table empty handed, covering the other’s wedding band with her palms.

“There’s me,” she had said.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic became more Sirius-centric than I'd originally anticipated (Alison Bechdel give me strength). 
> 
> Reposted from my LJ circa 2016.


End file.
